BlackBerry Torch 9860 Smartphone

BlackBerry Torch 9860 Smartphone Price, Features and Expectations: Domination of the smartphone market has been hotly contested for as long as we can remember. With the smartphone revolution started by Apple with the release of the original iPhone a couple of years back, the way we look at present-day smartphones has never been the same since then.

Manufacturers instantly recognized the pile of money they can make on this category of mobile phones and started flooding the market with these nifty devices. Manufacturers such as Motorola, Samsung, HTC and the like along with Apple have been going against each other in coming up with the smartest smartphone.

In fact, with the many options that you can see lining up the shelves, getting a smartphone for yourself has become a tad difficult nowadays. It is as if every smartphone looks exactly like the next one so making a choice would be very hard.

To make their products easily distinguished, manufacturers have resulted to gimmicks or marketing ploys to give their bet a bit of an edge. LG for example came out with a smartphone with a 3D display that doesn’t need special 3D glasses to take advantage of and so on and so forth.

Research in Motion on the other hand has relied stuck to the tried and tested seamless email integration for their lineup of BlackBerry smartphones. And with the release of the BlackBerry Torch 9860, RIM is again upping the ante and trying to ride with the pack.

How good then is the BlackBerry Torch 9860? What specs does it bring to the table? How will it fare against the competition? Will it revive the waning interest for the BlackBerry line, which basically doesn’t have that much to offer aside from its email integration? Read on as we take a sneak peek at the BlackBerry Torch 9860.

Design and construction

The Torch 9860 is actually a first for Research in Motion. This is the first smartphone that the company came up with that actually has the ugly black slab of plastic look. It measures 120 x 62 x 11.5 mm and tips the scales at 135 grams.

Despite the seeming similarity to the staples from Samsung and LG, the Torch 9860 is still worlds apart from these usual bad boys because it has the build quality that RIM has come to be known for. If everything goes fine, the Torch 9860 is expected to be solidly-built just like the older smartphones that the company released.

It has a clean, minimalist look and that streamlined feel to it so the device, despite having that ugly black slab of plastic look rather looks elegant when you come to think of it. This I guess would stem from the long history of RIM coming up with smartphones that are aimed for business executives and the Torch 9860 is no exception to the rule.

Under the hood

Deciding that enough is enough in terms of always getting left out when it comes to the specs that matter, RIM decided to play the game and packed the Torch 9860 with a 1.2 GHz processor. Slaving for the processor is 768 MB of RAM but sad to say, RIM looks like it has an aversion for dedicated GPUs so the Torch 9860 doesn’t have one.

For storage purposes, the Torch 9860 has 4GB of onboard memory. Obviously, this is a bit measly compared to what the competition has but a dedicated microSD card slot makes memory expansion possible especially that it can handle cards of up to 32 Gb.

The display

The Torch 9860 packs an industry-standard 3.7-inch TFT capacitive touchscreen with a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels and 16M colors. Below the display is the optical trackpad found in the later iterations of the Bold line. This optical trackpad actually makes navigation of the user interface of the device a bit easier.

Surprisingly, the Torch 9860 now has integrated sensors that we usually see from handsets released by HTC and Samsung. It has a proximity sensor along with an accelerometer to add functionality to the device and to top it all off, it also supports multi-touch input.

The shooter

Sadly, the Torch 9860 only has one camera. It is a rear-facing 5-megapixel shooter with continuous focus, face detection, geotagging, and image stabilization. The shooter can capture stills of up to 2592 x 1944 pixels and even has a video mode to boot. Switch to video and the Torch 9860 turns to a camcorder capable of capturing 720p video clips.

The bottom line

RIM, when it came out with the Torch 9860, is boasting that this device is a real game-changer. Not only does it try to match the bad boys of the smartphone market spec-for-spec, it also has an elegant looking body.

In addition to that, battery life is also very good where the 1230 mAh Lithium-Ion power pack of the Torch 9860 supplies juice to the handset so it can last up to 6.5 hours of talk time and 330 hours of standby time.

No pricing scheme is available yet but expect the BlackBerry Torch 9860 to cost a lot. But for good looks, better specs, and best email integration that it offers, the price will definitely be negligible.

BlackBerry Torch 9860 Smartphone Price in the Philippines: To Be Announced (TBA)